Two quick links

Two important topics that deserve long posts, but I haven't got the time and haven't any particular insights so instead I'll link you elsewhere.

First, have you heard about the truly sickening atrocities being committed against women in the Congo? As part of the war/rebel action/what-have-you in the Democratic Republic of Congo, women are routinely raped in ways so brutal, you could not have imagined it in your worst nightmare. Bobita brought my attention to this intolerable situation that, somehow, the United Nations seems to be tolerating just fine. (As little as the U.N. has done on Darfur, they're doing less for the women of the Congo.) Read Canadian Stephen Lewis's speach about the atrocities. Don't read it if you're feeling fragile—really, the events he discusses are more horrifying than the violence in those "torture porn" horror movies like Hostel or Saw II or Captivity, and they're factual. Not sure what we can do to spur the global community to action on this. Please share any ideas you may have.

Second, Amanda Marcotte on the global gag rule. Read to learn why the gag rule (that prevents U.S. funding of overseas women's health initiatives) isn't about abortion so much as depriving women of contraception and reproductive health care.

Late at night on pay cable

Have you seen that new HBO series, Tell Me You Love Me? Last week, Mr. Tangerine was watching the first episode after I'd gone to bed. He raced into the bedroom to tell me what I'd missed (and this weekend, showed me the scene when the episode aired again): the money shot. Woman giving her male partner a handjob, a spurt ending up on his chest. (CGI spooge?) Other fictional couples on the show have fairly convincing sex on screen (pumping and humping), and there is no shortage of naked butts, penises, breasts, or cooter shots. And yet the rest of the show plays as a standard soapy/whiny drama about couples in counseling and the self-involved problems in their relationships.

The cast isn't cheesy porno people, either. There are people you've seen before. Sonya Walger was the Englishwoman on Mind of a Married Man (the "happy ending" show) and was also on Lost. Ally Walker played The Profiler back in the day, and has lost the furrows on her brow. The psychologist or psychiatrist the characters see is played by Jane Alexander, and apparently E.R.'s Sherry Stringfield will pop up too.

If you have not seen this show, you may be saying to yourself, "Wow, that show sounds hot. TV-MA, strong sexual content, explicit nudity? Whoo!" It actually turns out to be entirely unerotic. (Mr. Tangerine agrees.) It may look like real sex on screen, but it looks like real bad sex. Nobody's having fun. Nobody's moaning. Nobody's laughing. Man, this show could ruin real people's sex lives! It's highly irresponsible and an abuse of the TV-MA rating.

So if you're up late and want to watch something risque on cable to get into a frisky mood...don't watch this show. If you like rather depressing shows about imperfect relationships, though, it might be a decent choice.

Can you hear me now?

Last week, Tertia blogged about hearing loss. She took her son for a hearing test and thought he was deaf because he kept reacting when there was no sound—only it turned out that his hearing was perfect and he was reacting appropriately to sounds his mother could no longer hear. As we go through life and our ears are cumulatively battered by years of noise, hearing acuity often declines with age.

A couple of Tertia's commenters admitted to having trouble understanding what people were saying, but blithely expressed their desire to "la la la," remain in denial and avoid even getting their hearing tested by an audiologist. Here's how I responded:

Okay, you people who say you want to be in denial about age-related losses in hearing are seriously pissing me off. First off, don't think of it as age per se, but as accumulated exposure to loud noise that has been killing off the sensory cells in your ears. It happens.

I've been hard of hearing my whole life, and hearing aids do help a lot. If your hair covers your ears, nobody even knows you have them. If your hair doesn't cover your ears, those teeny in-the-canal and in-the-ear hearing aids, flesh-toned, aren't so glaringly obvious. What is glaringly obvious is hearing loss. If you turn the TV up loud, if you misunderstand what people have said and reply inappropriately, if you keep asking people to repeat themselves—believe me, people will notice your hearing loss more than hearing aids. And hearing aids don't bother anyone else, whereas blaring the TV or accusing people of mumbling does bother them. So don't be selfish and vain.

If you know someone who's hard of hearing (even with hearing aids—they help but they don't provide perfect childlike hearing levels), keep these in mind:

1. Speak clearly, with your face towards the person, and don't cover your mouth with your hand, a restaurant menu, etc. Lip-reading cues help.

2. If the person asks you to repeat yourself, don't say the exact same words again. Rephrase it! The different arrangement of sounds may be easier for the hard-of-hearing person to understand correctly.

3. If you want to tell them a secret, speak softly face-on. Whispering straight in their ear means no lip-reading or face-reading cues to help get your point across.

And if you'd like to preserve your hearing, don't blast your iPod or MP3 player. Younger generations will be hard of hearing much earlier in life because of those damn earbuds with the volume too high.

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If you have any questions about hearing or hearing loss, feel free to ask. But speak up a little, will ya? Thanks.

The most inadvertently lewd town on earth

My in-laws have a house in Florida near a town called Inverness. What does Inverness have to offer? Well, next month, they're having another Cooter Festival, as previously mocked on The Daily Show. This local blogger loathes it. On the way out of town, you pass Cooter Pond., which...I don't know how that would be a good double entendre. Cooter wand, sure. Pond? I got nothin'.

Then there's the furniture store:



And during last week's visit to Florida, a new strip-mall eatery announced itself with bold signage:



Alas, the kafe was not yet open, so I don't know what's on the menu. Fish? Tacos? What else should they serve?

Catching up

I have some things to write about our trip to Florida last week, but I ought to be editing this very minute so I won't start on that. I do have that flight-related post I wrote during the flight, but that's on my laptop and not this machine, so that's embargoed for now. So let me share a Ben story instead:

Ben's sinus infection cleared up, but you know how sinuses are—they take a while to settle down, so he's still got a little phlegm-dripping action triggering a bit of a cough. This morning I asked him if he'd been coughing during the day at school (yesterday was his first day of second grade), and he was explaining to me the dripping, the coughing to clear his throat, etc. I gave him a Claritin to maybe clear his nose out a bit today, and he swallowed the wee tablet gladly.

Then Ben said, "I've been farting a lot, too. What can I take for that?"

Ah, the age-old question.

Hugo Chavez and Mr. Tangerine

So, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez announced that his country's moving up a half hour. Yep, he's putting Venezuela into its own half-hour-off time zone. (Speaking of half-hour-off time zones, look at Australia's map, which doesn't even show the little area that's off by 45 minutes.) Chavez has ideas about giving a metabolic jump-start to his people, but I'm not sure science is on his side.

Closer to home, we had a power outage yesterday from the cuckoo thunderstorms that uprooted our favorite neighborhood mulberry tree and many others, tore off countless tree limbs, and dashed assorted high rise windows and swimming-pool roofs to the ground. That's got nothing to do with my point, but who doesn't like to talk about extreme weather? Anyway, I was engaging in the ritual Resetting of the Clocks. Mr. Tangerine's alarm clock had been set about 26 minutes ahead (a hassle when Ben comes in and tells me it's 8:00 and thus time to get up, when it's really closer to 7:30 and dammit, I'm trying to sleep here). So I asked him what clock setting he wanted. "A half hour ahead," he said.

Next thing you know, my husband will be reading Noam Chomsky and saying that Bush is the devil and smells of sulfur.

*cough cough*

Poor Ben. He's got a sinus infection.

For a few days he had one of those fevers without accompanying symptoms, and then when the fever dropped down, his nose filled up. And then the nighttime coughing started—last night, he coughed so hard it gave him a headache.

So we went to see the pediatrician today. Before she came into the exam room, I bet Ben a dollar that she would exclaim over how tall he'd gotten (because that seems to be the obligatory thing that people always say to him). Yes, I am teaching my child to incorporate gambling into daily living; you got a problem with that? But she didn't say it! Ben demanded the dollar anyway. Because I'm an old softy (and doing a lousy job of teaching my child how gambling works, apparently), I did give him that dollar at bedtime. I tucked it in his Mason jar of cash. "I collect money," Ben told me. It's not his only collection, either. He also picked up a bunch of beer bottlecaps along the lakefront. Gambling, beer paraphernalia, and money collecting—you can't say that atheists don't raise children to have tiptop morals!

Anyway, the doctor prescribed amoxicillin for the sinus infection and recommended giving him Claritin, Mucinex (I just love the generic name, guaifenesin), and drops of saline in the nose followed by vigorous nose-blowing to clear out the sinuses. Or as I like to put it, he's to "blow his nose till he cain't blow no more." It's not an instant cure, so he's still coughing a fair amount tonight. But soon he'll get better.

On the plus side, we had some time to kill at Walgreens while waiting for the prescription to be filled. So we headed to the candy aisle, which amused me by being home to not only vast quantities of sugar and fat, but also hosting the Alli and other weight-loss products in a sealed case. "I'm fat. I really need some help losing weight. Where's that Alli stuff? Oh, here it is. Huh. It's locked in this case. I don't see an employee around here, either. What's this over here? Large Lindt bars, tins of mini chocolate truffles, king-sized candy bars, and sacks of candy? Hmm." My eyes scavenged the entire aisle until I finally found my manna: Sno-Caps. Eh, they're not as good as last time. Should've just grabbed the king-size Snickers Almond, man.

Scar chat

Chris Clarke wrote about his scars, which naturally caused me to think of my own.

My biggest scar: From my C-section, a bikini-line incision. It measures 5 ½ inches from end to end, and a human being was pulled through that slit. Granted, Ben was a very small human being at that point, but still—it's really not a wide scar at all considering its purpose. The nurses on the OB ward marveled at what a lovely incision the doctor had made. Um, all right, if you say so.

My most dramatic scar: A half-inch oval on the inside of my left calf. In 1991, my new husband and I went downtown for Chicago's grand 3rd of July fireworks. Hey, when you add a million spectators and their cars to a small part of downtown, nobody's getting home at a decent hour, so why hold the fireworks show on the 4th? Everyone who has to work on the 5th will be short on sleep. Given those huge crowds, including many thousands of people taking the bus or the El, getting home by public transportation was going to be crowded, sweaty, and uniformly unpleasant. So Mr. Tangerine and I decided we'd walk home along the lakefront. Sure, the 5-mile walk would take us a couple hours, but it was a lovely night.

Alas, some bozo on Lake Shore Drive lit a cherry bomb and tossed it over the edge of the road...and down to the crowded sidewalks by Monroe Harbor, filled with holiday revelers. That firecracker exploded in the air next to my leg. I had a gouged-out spot on my calf, a bleeding chemical burn, plus many speckles of chemical burn on the rest of my leg real estate. The concussive noise knocked out my hearing for a few days. And boy-oh-boy, you don't want to be in a crowded place outdoors when you require emergency medical assistance. We walked a few blocks to North Pier, with bars and restaurants and phones, and waited for my ambulance. A fire truck arrived first. For me! I felt so special. Then they summoned an ambulance because I didn't much feel like walking to the ER...though it probably would have been faster to walk, I was pretty out of it. The ambulance carted me, what, maybe a half mile. I don't remember how long the trip took.

I had to bide my time in the ER—that woman who'd been beaned by a glass beer bottle was a higher priority. Eventually they tended to my wounds and prescribed a silver burn ointment, and I skipped pantyhose for a couple weeks. (I can scarcely believe that I was wearing pantyhose every day to work back them. Everyone did! Those were crazy times.)

The truly dramatic part of this tale is that we had been strolling behind a couple who were walking their bikes. Attached to one bike was a trailer with their twin babies going for a ride. Can you imagine if the cherry bomb had been tossed a moment sooner and it had exploded between those babies? Or if it had been next to my head and not my lower legs?

People who are made uneasy by fireworks and/or crowd scenes love this story and retell it to explain their objections to 4th of July antics.

So: How big is your biggest scar? What's your best scar story?

Only one shopping day left!

That's right. It's about to be my birthday.

I'm getting older. No turning back, no stopping the aging process, no slowing it down.

But I'm at a good spot in my life, I am. I fulfilled that life goal of publishing my first book by age 40. (Okay, that's total bullshit. I made up that goal when I realized the book would be out several weeks before the next birthday, and congratulated myself for the achievement.) I love my husband and my kid (who, by the way, is looking tough these days with his first-ever buzzcut), and all is right with the world. Well, okay, that's not true—but within this little corner of the world, things are just fine.

And a history of sun avoidance means my skin doesn't show my years. So happy thirty-eleventh birthday to me!

Waffles topped with misogyny

Do you ever hanker for a melding of The Comics Curmudgeon and I Blame the Patriarchy? Well, hanker no more. Jay—who yielded to temptation after I fed her a series of tasty links to blogs and started blogging—observed some misogyny before breakfast in yesterday's funny pages.

I win at nonspirituality!

I might well be the single least spiritual person of your acquaintance.

The vigorously philosophical atheists and agnostics who engage in discussion about their beliefs are devoting far more time than I do to matters of the spirit or lack thereof.

I don't believe in God, Zeus, Odin, Thoth, Goddess, an overriding essence within nature, an omniscient power, Buddha, Ganesh, Satan, tree spirits, New Age spirituality, Wicca, druids, pagans, "something out there," or the rest of that ilk. I don't believe in immortal souls. I don't believe in life after death, though I recognize what a lovely idea it is, particularly for someone whose life on earth pretty well sucked.

I don't crave the community and ritual associated with congregations and worship services.

I never believed in a god. Not as a child, not in adolescence, not in college, not in adulthood. I never had a flirtation with religious belief. I never tried on a denomination for size. I never grappled with doubts that my beliefs might be wrong. I never feared that I ought to choose religious faith just to be on the safe side. I didn't have my son baptized just to appease the relatives who wanted him baptized.

I do, however, have morals. I live an ethical life. I play fair. I nurture my friends and love my family. I let pedestrians in the crosswalk do their thing. I count my grocery items and never get in the express checkout lane unless I'm within two items of the allowable total. (Twelve, ten, what's the difference?) I'm a nice person.

I don't think there are many of us, in the U.S. at least, who have been this resolutely nonreligious and nonspiritual throughout their lives. How many do you know? And are they lovely people?

Skinny girls

The other day I was downtown and noticed some skinny girls visiting Millennium Park with their families. Not women—girls. Say, 12 years old. Long, skinny legs, skinny arms, skinny waist.

Me, I was a scrawny kid. Not one of those gangly long-legged skinny kids, but short and skinny. A lot of kids are just naturally built like beanpoles.

What struck me is that the build of a 12-year-old skinny girl who hasn't quite launched into puberty is the very body type that the fashion industry promotes. Add three years to this girl, let her grow taller but not rounder, and she becomes the ideal model.

So really, that ideal isn't just about emphasizing thinness. That thinness evokes images of reed-thin 12-year-old girls, doesn't it? It's not exactly the sexualization of childhood, but it's definitely the sexualization or fetishizing of a childlike physique.

Thoughts?

A touch of patriarchy blaming

Two recent articles left me chortling at the idiocy of some men.

In the New York Times, there was an article about a new fall show called Reaper, scheduled to air on the CW network. The main characters are guys, but—are you sitting down?—the show is written by a pair of women. Yes, women! See:

More than anything else, however, the show has turned heads with its writing, which was unexpected for several reasons. The writers behind the show had chiefly worked on the crime drama “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” not a series known for its laugh lines; and they put together a pair of lead characters who most resemble the slacker guys now dominating contemporary film comedy (as in “Knocked Up”).

But the writers themselves are nothing like those guys. In fact they are women.

The show's director is Kevin Smith, who pronounces that "for two chicks to write something like this, that was kind of spellbinding.”

The article breathlessly points out how implausible it is that women—ordinary 35-year-old non-men!—could summon the ability to write immature jackass slacker guy characters. Because...why? Because women have never been exposed to such fellas and couldn't conceive of what they'd say and do?

Gimme a fucking break.

But it gets worse: Listen to one of the actors in the show.

The dialogue between the two buddies seems so authentic that Mr. Labine said he was stunned to learn two women had written it. “I didn’t actually read who wrote it when I read the script the first two times,” he said. “And then I saw it, and I was like just shocked. They definitely did a little research to figure out how to write for dudes.”

I look forward to more breathless Times articles about men! who have TV writing jobs! and write female characters! Omigod, how do they do it?!?

And then, holy shit! What about books by men? What about Shakespeare? How unusual for male writers to be able to write female characters. What'll they think of next?

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The other article was Louisa Thomas's "Rebuttal Dept." piece in the New Yorker. She presented Hawaiian Tropic Zone restaurateur Dennis Riese's impassioned rebuttal of the idea that his place is nothing more than a fancy Hooters.

If you were trying to write a satirical piece mocking the mindless sexism of a man who thinks he's a feminist but isn't, you might hit many of the same points Riese makes.

Nor is Hawaiian Tropic Zone a strip club. “No nipples,” Riese said. “You’re never, ever going to see a girl nude.” He continued, “I’m such a feminist. I love women and believe in them. And I’m not being P.C. by saying that men and women like to look at the woman’s form—it’s been going on since Michelangelo, you know, since they were doing statues of Venus de Milo. So I really believed that I was creating a restaurant that was going to appeal to men and women. I used colors that are very feminine in this place.” He gestured toward a tropical mosaic and toward a pair of soft-orange overhead lights shaped—as are the salt and pepper shakers—like breasts.

(Insert your own point-by-point critiques here.)

Riese says his restaurant is woman-friendly because they offer "simply grilled" menu items for the girls who are on a diet, and allows sharing of dishes for the girls who are (a) on a diet and (b) broke. Riese continues:

“Women like sexy. Talk about empowerment and feminism! There’s nowhere offering women sexy in the way they would like it to be—classy sexy!”

The next sentence in the article describes the waitress's outfit: a string-bikini top and a mini-sarong. Classy sexy! And empowerful!

A male customer asks Riese if it's true that customers get to rank the waitresses by attractiveness level. Riese is quick to deny it and to explain his evolved stance:

“No, but we have a beauty pageant,” Riese said. “Twice a night. Music comes on, and they walk across that stage up there. The ballots are on every table.” The winner, Riese said, “gets a little tiara, and she wins fifty dollars.”

“My understanding was that you rank them, from one to ten,” the banker persisted. “And it seemed surprising to me—I would think that the women who scored very low, especially ones who took pride in their good looks or their bodies—”

“But we don’t do that,” Riese interrupted. “That would be prehistoric.”

It would be insulting to you, the reader, for me to explain the critical errors Riese makes in his feminist praxis. You can fill in all the blanks yourself, can't you?

BlogHer!

I was delighted when I learned that Feral was coming to Chicago for this weekend's BlogHer conference. I looked through the course offerings for the conference, and spotted one session that was right up my alley—finding out how to port your blog to a hosted site, away from the teat of Blogger or TypePad. I'm thinking about doing that for one or both of my babies, so it looked practical.

I didn't register, though, because (a) there was still plenty of time, (b) I didn't get around to it, and (c) there were a zillion sessions that didn't call out to me. Then I decided that dammit, I was going to the conference! After browsing through the gynormous list of speakers on Monday evening, I went to the registration page...and discovered that I was eight minutes too late. Eight!

I wasn't sure if there'd be on-site registration and figured I'd mosey over on Saturday morning and see. Then I saw Tribune blogger Steve Johnson's post about BlogHer and learned that registration was reopened this morning. Woot! Now I'm officially signed up, and nobody can bar me from tomorrow's cocktail party.

So I'll be heading to the conference in the morning, learning some things, lunching with Feral, perhaps learning some unknown other things in the afternoon, and then mingling with bloggers known and unknown.

Perhaps I'll see some of you there. If you don't know what I look like or what my real name is, just, uh, home in on the most fabulous attendee and assume that's me.

"Your blog is locked"

Yesterday, I got myself in a blogging mood and I was all set to write some fiery-yet-droll prose, when what should befall me but being tarred by Blogger's nuttiness.

Blogger's spam-prevention robots have detected that your blog has characteristics of a spam blog. Since you're an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not a spam blog. Automated spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and we sincerely apologize for this false positive.

You won't be able to publish posts to your blog until one of our humans reviews it and verifies that it is not a spam blog. Please fill out the form below to get a review. We'll take a look at your blog and unlock it in less than two business days.

If we don't hear from you, though, we will remove your blog from Blog*Spot within a few weeks.

Holy schnike! If I'd gone on vacation or into the hospital, or just got too busy to post, they'd delete my entire blog?

Blogger explains that spam blogs contain strings of random text and a crapload of links that all go to the same site. O-o-o-kay. Not seeing how my blog looks like that. My last few posts had some links, but they didn't all go to the same place.

Here's my favorite part: The part where Blogger says "until one of our humans reviews it." Doesn't that sound like a fun place to work? Wal-Mart has "associates" and Disney World has "cast members." This is the first time I've seen employees referred to as "our humans."

It is a comfort to know that decisions on my blog are not being delegated to lemurs, I suppose. Or bears. An angry bear might remove blogs out of spite, you know? And the computers, well, we all saw what HAL did in 2001: A Space Odyssey. What if Blogger outsourced to earthworms? How would they work their keyboards and see their monitors, being eyeless and limbless?

If you could have some employees working for you at home, what species would they be?

Gynormous

The other week, Merriam-Webster announced that its new collegiate dictionary would include 100 new words.

I'm delighted that ginormous made the grade. I've been sold on the word since I heard Will Ferrell's Buddy the Elf say, "Hey! Have you seen these toilets? They're ginormous!" (WAV file here) in the movie, Elf.

Last night over dinner, though, my mom said she doesn't like the word because she hears it with a y ... gynormous. Mr. Tangerine immediately mimed what someone might do when traversing some gynormous female body parts.

Oh! And then Mom recounted a medical record she'd transcribed at work the other day, in which the patient reportedly had one normal labium (yes! labia is the plural of labium) and one labium that can only be described as gynormous. It hung down seven inches. And had something hard inside. That felt like cardboard. Truly gynormous, no? (Sorry, I don't know what sort of diagnosis or body modification technique is involved here.)

Can you use gynormous in a sentence?

Crotch shots of the candidates

(The picture above is discussed at the end of the post.)

A Washington Post fashion article dithered breathlessly about the greater meaning of Hillary Rodham Clinton's modest amount of cleavage on C-SPAN 2. The article is ridiculous from start to finish, and leaves the impression that gazing upon such a salacious expanse of flesh is enough to give one the vapors.



The writer, Robin Givhan, bloviated, "Showing cleavage is a request to be engaged in a particular way. It doesn't necessarily mean that a woman is asking to be objectified, but it does suggest a certain confidence and physical ease.

"It means that a woman is content being perceived as a sexual person in addition to being seen as someone who is intelligent, authoritative, witty and whatever else might define her personality. It also means that she feels that all those other characteristics are so apparent and undeniable, that they will not be overshadowed," Givhan continues.

This did not go unnoticed at NOW headquarters. Weeks ago, they started a petition to the media asking them to abstain from writing about Clinton in ways they'd never write about a male candidate. (You can sign the petition at that link.) So they take articles like this seriously, but are not Humorless Feminists™—they also recognized the hilarious absurdity of the piece. In today's "NOW Actions" e-mail, they're calling for your reactions to the story, 'whether analysis or satire." Send your responses to cleavage@now.org.

Here's what I think:

Every time a male candidate is seen without a jacket, let us call on the media to take pictures from the rear. The electorate cannot make an informed decision without scrutinizing the asses of all the candidates and parsing the inner meaning of the fit of their pants. Does it look like he's lost a little weight? Or gained? Has he been working out? Are his buttocks probably flabby? What sort of gluteal confidence does he present?

Let's not forget where the focus really belongs, however: The media must scrutinize the candidates' frontal presentations, too. Is there a hint of firm pectoral muscles, or of man-boobs, or of age-related sagging? And how about his crotch--is there a hint of penis? How big? Which side is it resting on? Do his balls hang low, do they wobble to and fro?

Really, the only male politician we've had these discussions about is Dick Cheney (see intriguing photo here). And he's not running for office. We need close-ups, people! Close-ups of the crotches of every man running for president!

Bush kicks puppies

America's Children's Health Insurance Program is set to expire on September 30. The Senate Finance Committee has been hammering out the details of a bipartisan plan to extend the program and to fund increased spending by hiking the federal cigarette tax (from 39¢ to $1 a pack). There are currently about 8 million uninsured kids, and the increased spending would cut that total by 4.1 million children.

"Wow!" you say. "That sounds great! Because uninsured kids suffer, and some even die because their families can't afford health care. And raising cigarette taxes always seems to be a politically safe means of raising tax revenue."

The White House says Bush will veto any such proposal. Why? White House spokesman Tony Fratto said, "The proposal would dramatically expand the Children’s Health Insurance Program, adding nonpoor children to the program, and more than doubling the level of spending. This will have the effect of encouraging many to drop private coverage, to go on the government-subsidized program." Also, the proposal doesn't pander to President Bush, who wants to set up tax breaks for people buying insurance—as if the average poor family could afford to buy health insurance if only they knew they'd get a fraction of the money back the following April. (Of course, the electric company and the grocery store aren't going to wait until next April to get paid, so really, Bush's concept is strikingly unhelpful for the poor.

One of my son's friends is on our state's health plan for kids. (Gov. Blagojevich may be incredibly corrupt, but he supported this program so he's not all bad.) This boy has asthma and needs pricey brand-name medications to keep his airways open. The state program provides his life-saving drugs and he rarely misses school (he's in the gifted program, where they move fast) because of his asthma. His mother simply doesn't have the money to pay for these prescriptions out of pocket, and I imagine private insurance programs would also be out of reach. Since he's covered by Illinois's universal children's health insurance, he won't end up as another tragic story like Deamonte Driver's.

I think Bush also eats kittens.

Coin purse

It's time to coin some new words. The other day, I used hotgry as the hot-and-cranky counterpart to hangry, which is hungry-angry. But hotgry doesn't flow. I need a solid adjective to describe the way I feel when, say, it's a little too warm out and a little too humid, I'm trying to get dressed and leave the house, and a sticky sweat is breaking out and making me unreasonably ornery. (Or maybe reasonably ornery.) I know some of you can relate to this feeling, so how about suggesting an adjective to dsecribe it?

My friend B. concocted the perfect noun form, Sweltschmerz. It's swelter + Schmerz, which is German for "pain." It rhymes beautifully with Weltschmerz, or world-weariness.

The other day, I saw the surname Mooncotch on a construction crane. It's not as if we need more words for the crotch, the ass, and points in between. But doesn't mooncotch sound like it pertains to all those? "I need some Monistat—my mooncotch is on fire!" "I rode my bike into a wall and smashed my mooncotch." "I can't believe how much sand I got in my mooncotch from going to the beach." "You know what a Brazilian is, don't you? They wax your whole mooncotch, stem to stern."

Photoblogging

I've had the same cell phone for a couple years now, but it took me until this week to do something with all those photos I'd been storing on it. Here are some pictures, at long last freed from their telephonic jail.

In the lobby of Northwestern's Galter Pavilion medical office building, there's a large painting depicting the construction of the building:



Let's take a closer look at the figure in the middle, shall we?



Pretty damned hot for a doctor's office, no? Speaking of hot, what's a restaurant to do when the dog days of summer roll in but there's no air conditioner? Easy: Pull up a chair and grab a bucket:



What if you lost your beloved dog but you couldn't spell "shih-tzu"?



Is it just me, or does the sunken-in rubber head on this Halloween dummy look like Newt Gingrich crossed with a rotting potato?



Look at the treasures you can find at the park! (We kept the spoon.)



"Junior, why don't you go pick out a book about science?"



It was cool when Batman Begins 2: The Dark Knight was filming in the neighborhood. A couple Gotham PD squad cars were parked by Ben's school:



Everything famous comes to my neighborhood! Case in point: The Police concert. (And Flea, who was to my right when I took this picture.)



Sometimes rude giants also come over, though. This bozo was two rows below me, and yet his enormous head kept blocking my view of the stage. Whenever he got excited, he waved his arms in the air like he just didn't care, obscuring the view for a few more rows behind him.



And that gets us caught up to last Friday, so that's enough pictures for now, eh?

Feel free to suggest captions for any that capture your fancy.